Indiana talent: plugging Indiana's brain drain with stars like Butler's A.J. Graves.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: AROUND INDIANA - AIT Laboratories

A.J. GRAVES HAS A WAY with numbers. Like 13.6, his senior-year scoring average as a star basketball player for Butler University in Indianapolis. And .889, his free-throw percentage as a Bulldog. And 46. That's the percentage of the employed 2008 Butler graduates who remain in Indiana pursuing a career. Graves is one of those who decided to stay.

Yes, the two-time Academic All-America honor squad member from Switz City could probably have built a career around his basketball talents. "Back in April, I was teetering back and forth between basketball and going out into the business world," he says. The business world won out. "I decided this was a better opportunity for me in the long run."

The opportunity that he landed was a job as a business analyst at AIT Laboratories, an Indianapolis-based independent reference laboratory, offering testing and research services. It fit with his mathematics degree, but also with his goals for the future. Instead of shooting hoops for pay, he's doing research and writing reports--and with AIT's help, starting on his master's degree in statistics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

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It's one small step in the battle to keep the best minds from crossing state lines after...